


Half-Life

by Sarah T (SarahT), SarahT



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-02 16:20:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19445098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/Sarah%20T, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/SarahT
Summary: Erik's seen men broken by imprisonment before. He will not give that to them. Any of them.





	Half-Life

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the Spike for betaing and D. for very helpful suggestions.
> 
> This story prompted by the realization that Erik spent _ten years in solitary_ between _First Class_ and _Days of Future Past_.

Coming to in his cell for the first time is like finding himself in a movie with the soundtrack inexplicably gone, characters moving and gesturing and opening and closing their mouths in complete silence. Erik’s lying on a foam mat on the floor in a closed pentagonal space, lit by strangely blue-toned lights, with a ceiling of segmented glass. They’ve taken away his clothes and given him a grey uniform. The only other thing in the room is a plastic bottle of water.

And none of that matters because he can’t feel any metal _anywhere_. Casting around for it is like probing a Novocained tooth with his tongue. Even the uniform is closed with Velcro rather than a zipper.

He jumps to his feet, ignoring the pain in his ribs and almost everywhere else, and peers upward with mounting panic. He’s in a deep, deep shaft, so deep he can only just guess the top of it. All—all—apparently stone. Dead space to his searching power. There’s not so much as a vein of feldspar. Completely unnatural.

He thinks he might actually be sick, then he is. But nothing comes up.

After a few minutes of retching on his knees, he crawls to the bottle of water and takes a cautious sip. He’ll just have to risk it being drugged. His stomach rebels, but it stays down. 

He’s failed. He’s failed and they have him at their nonexistent mercy now and, just for a moment, a cold fear glints in him, the glint of light on a rusty old bonesaw splotched with blood. If there _were_ any metal around him, it would be rattling. 

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. Enough. It’s not for _him_ to feel fear. In fact, these extraordinary measures demonstrate their terror of him and what he can do. They’re containing him as far below the surface as they possibly can, like radioactive cesium. 

Well, he says to himself. It takes decades for cesium to decay. 

Over the ringing silence in his ears, he promises himself that it will take him at least that long.

There are many attempts to interrogate him the first few days. They make him lie face-down on the floor of his cell while they bind his hands behind him (agony for his battered shoulder) and shackle his feet, then shuffle him into a small room just off a hall leading to the observation space above his cell, equipped with a wooden chair and table and a hanging overhead light of the same kind they’re using in his cell. He’s seen the inside of these kinds of rooms before, and braces himself. 

But all they do is ask him stupid questions in stupid ways. Is he working with the Russians? Does he have co-conspirators in the government? Will there be more attacks?

They stand over him and yell, they thrust gruesome pictures of the murdered president at him, they threaten that he’ll leave this prison only in a body bag. He doesn’t say anything. 

The Russians, he thinks, would already have pulled out all of his fingernails, one by one.

One man, small and insinuating, says that he wants to help him. That he knows Erik is a refugee and must have had a hard time of it. He can make the others understand, but Erik has to help him. He needs a little cooperation first, as a sign of good faith. 

They’d put a badge on him that says “0001” and they want him to _cooperate_ , as if he doesn’t know what that means.

But, out of a certain curiosity, he asks, “Cooperation?” 

The man looks pleased with his breakthrough, leaning closer. “Oh, nothing big. Well, for instance. We’d really like to speak to Charles Xavier.”

The man has a pin in his knee. Erik had sensed it the moment he’d come in, tingling so that he’d had to curl his fingers into his palm to keep the thing still, but he’d judged it would take too long to pull it out of him for him to use it in an escape attempt. Now, he feels it begin to bore through flesh. The man screams and clutches at the knee, which only means that, when they finally club Erik unconscious, the pin is halfway through his hand. 

He wakes up back in his cell with blood crusted into the corners of his mouth, a pounding headache, and a savage feeling of satisfaction. 

They stop questioning him after that. Surprisingly, no one shows up hoping to use him as a lab rat, either. It certainly can’t be scruples on their part. Perhaps they’d gotten what they wanted when they first brought him in. Perhaps they’ve decided not to press their luck. (Either way, it's a long time before that tension fades, and it never goes entirely.) 

Without the visits from the extraction team, his cell is deadly quiet. The temperature remains slightly too cold at all times. The air is filtered and flavorless. The light never so much as dims. The only way to mark the time from day to day are the three meals and the hourly visual inspection by the guard above, who never speaks a word, only peers down briefly. He might as well be marooned on an uncharted island. 

He keeps himself alert and ready, though. He can’t be certain when Mystique will attempt a break-in, only that she must. Every hour he’s awake, he searches the face above the glass for a hint, a flash of yellow eyes or a ripple of blue scales at the throat. 

Every time, he sees only the dull eyes of some witless young soldier looking back. 

They tell him there’s going to be a trial. Apparently, he won’t be invited.

“How interesting,” he says.

They tell him they’re going to give him an attorney.

He laughs. Only in America would they assign you an attorney for a kangaroo court.

While he waits, he builds castles in the air—actual castles, all of metal—or, at least, he imagines he does. He concentrates on picturing the pieces interlocking together precisely, the way the magnetic forces would feel around him, the strain and forces within the structure itself. Then he takes the construct apart, just as carefully. It can consume several hours in an evening, if he’s being particularly exacting with himself, and he’s beginning to feel the need to fill the time. 

It takes long enough that he begins to suspect they've decided not to bother with the charade. But, sure enough, one day, when the extraction team escorts him down the hallway, there’s a young woman in a suit standing in the room, instead of the usual idiots. She's very short, and her suit looks incongruous in this environment. 

“Can you remove the manacles, please?” she says to the head of the team. “I may need him to write.” 

He looks doubtful. “That’s not a good idea.” 

“I’ll be fine. You’ll be right out there. He can’t do much with his legs still shackled, now can he?” 

The guard considers, then gives in. Erik rubs at his wrists. The guard goes back out into the hallway after shooting him a threatening look. 

“Mr. Lehnsherr?” she says after the door closes. “I’m Anna Becker. I’ve accepted an appointment as your attorney.” 

He doesn’t sit down. “I’m sorry…” There’s no ring on her finger, but of course there wouldn’t be. 

“Mrs. Becker.” 

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Becker.” 

“About what?” 

“I won’t be taking part in this farce. You’ve made this trip for nothing.” 

She frowns and takes her own seat. “Mr. Lehnsherr, I understand you may not be used to our system. Regardless of whether you killed the president, you still deserve a zealous defense. That’s why I’m here.” 

She’s completely sincere. This, he thinks, truly is America. But he doesn't even need to consider it. 

“For the record, I didn’t,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be defending myself even if they let me attend. I don’t recognize their authority over me.” 

She looks at his chair until he gives in and sits down. “They could sentence you to death, Mr. Lehnsherr.” 

“Whether I participate in my trial will have no effect on that.” 

“That hasn’t been my experience.” 

“Whatever your experience has been,” he says, “it hasn’t been of this.” 

They lock eyes over the table. Finally, she says quietly, “Well. I have two hours scheduled with you, and I did come all the way from New York. What should we talk about?” 

“I don’t know. I’ve never been much of a conversationalist.” He smiles thinly. “What brings a nice young woman to a place like this?” 

She doesn’t smile back. “Graduating at the top of her class from Harvard Law School, but not being able to get a clerkship or a job at a Wall Street firm, and so ending up doing death-penalty work, which she is, in fact, pretty good at.” 

He raises his eyebrows. “I meant no disrespect.”

“What about you?” She looks around. “What puts a man in a cell buried hundreds of feet below the Pentagon?” 

What a question. Though at least now he knows where he is. 

“The entire history of the twentieth century, I suppose.” 

“Care to expand on that?” 

He shakes his head. “That’s more than enough.” 

They sit in silence. Erik doesn’t mind being out of the cell for a change, so he doesn’t object. She waits patiently for about twenty minutes. Then she stands and says, “Well. I’ll be seeing you in the next week or so. I’m filing some motions objecting to virtually every aspect of the proposed procedure. I’ll keep you up to date.” 

He rises and shrugs. “I can’t stop you.” 

“Not really. Let me know if you need anything. I may be able to help with conditions a little.” He raises a hand to dismiss her offer, but she’s going on. “Oh, and I haven’t any news of your professor friend.” 

He stares, and the guard comes in.

The lawyer’s mention of Charles gives his treacherous subconscious all the excuse it needs. The question bursts into his mind the minute he’s alone again: _what is Charles doing?_

Surely he knew at once what Erik had supposedly done. 

Surely by now he’s learned from Moira where Erik is being held. 

Yet he hasn’t turned up once in Erik’s mind, not to gloat or to lecture or to say “I told you so.” The mental airspace of the cell remains completely clear. Erik has had no opportunity to argue his innocence to the only person he actually _wants_ to. 

He’s surprised at how much it bothers him. Charles has already turned away from him. It shouldn’t matter. But somehow the thought of Charles thinking him worse than he is is genuinely painful. It makes him angry at the unfairness of it all.

Fine, Charles, he thinks at last. Keep your distance, if it helps you think you’re the better man. 

The persistent silence in his head is the only answer.

The next time the lawyer visits, he demands right away, “What did you mean? About news.” 

“Oh.” She blinks and looks pointedly around the room. He understands their conversations are meant to be private, but also that such guarantees mean little, down here. “I’m not allowed to tell you any news, Mr. Lehnsherr. I had to agree to that. They’re afraid that I might pass on something I’m not supposed to.” 

“I see.” 

“And, anyway, I don’t have any.” 

He frowns as she shifts into an account of the initial hearing. There must be some significance to what she’s saying, but he can’t decipher it. 

She visits once a week for the next five weeks to inform him about the trial, or, rather, she sits there and talks about it in passionate detail while he listens to the sound of her voice (pleasant enough, but he’d settle for almost any) and tries not to grasp the substance.

He’s not entirely successful. It’s going very badly. He’d told her that it would from the beginning.

Nonetheless, he finds himself getting impatient with her. Bad enough that he should be subjected to this absurdity. Worse that any human should have the audacity to sit in front of him and _care_ so very much. Her talk of due process and impartial judges and admissible evidence when he’s being tried by a secret military court feels like an elaborate joke at his expense.

And she always ends with that same mysterious statement, which grows more frustrating each time. 

He’s not surprised when she comes to him in the sixth week with the news of the verdict (guilty, indefinite detention), but he is surprised at what happens next: she bursts into tears. 

“Mrs. Becker—Anna—there’s really no need…” he begins awkwardly, but she flaps a hand at him with impatience. 

“I’m not _sad_ , Erik,” she says, dabbing hard at her eyes with her fingers. “I’m _angry_. They’re not even going to allow an appeal. I can’t believe this _happened_ in this country. I can’t believe I was such a fool as to think I might _help_.” 

He sits back, shaking his head, almost smiling despite her news. How is it possible, he asks himself, that the universe keeps sending him such people? 

Before she leaves, she hesitates, then repeats the familiar statement. 

“I’ve lost the case,” Erik says. “What are you trying to tell me?” 

“I’m not telling you anything at all,” she answers, and goes. 

It’s not long after the trial that Erik realizes that he’s been sitting against the wall rubbing his thumb and middle finger together for over an hour. He flattens his hand against the floor and wonders if they’ve noticed. 

Two weeks later, he comes to himself with the dizzy sense that he’s been pacing the perimeter of his cell for hours. 

He’s used to being alone, of course, but not like this. His entire adult life has been constant forward motion, driven by a higher purpose. Now, he’s been trapped under a glass, frozen still. There is nothing to occupy him but his thoughts, and, since the end of the trial, he’s had very little new to think of. 

Some prisoners, he recalls, escape into their memories, but there is very little he wants to remember. He relives Shaw’s death several dozen times, recovering every detail he possibly can, but eventually even those images lose their charge. There are moments on the run with Mystique that had meant something, at least, but, without privacy, he doesn’t care to indulge too much in thinking of her. And he doesn’t dare touch those few shining weeks in 1962 now kept locked away in a remote corner of his mind. He’s afraid even handling those memories down here will poison them. 

But one morning, slipping in and out of focus as he’s begun to do far too often, he thinks, unbidden, of watching from his window as Charles set off in his exercise gear for “his little constitutional” every morning of the week they’d spent in Westchester. It had been startling, this idea of needing to set yourself work to stay fit. To invent habits to challenge yourself. It implied a steady state of inaction that Erik had never known. 

Well, now he knows it.

He grimly sets himself to calisthenics and bodyweight-bearing exercise, mornings and evenings. He suspects mockery from the guards above, but, in case of a rescue, without metal he’ll need to be able to fight. 

Unfortunately, that doesn’t take up more than two hours a day. 

They’d offered him a Bible, early on. He’d almost fallen over laughing. But that must mean he’s permitted _some_ reading. He inquires, and nine days later gets a begrudging answer: he’s allowed one book at a time, chosen by them. 

He’s not sure what he’ll get. Two more days later, the small plastic tub in which they pass him necessities lands in his cell with a tattered paperback. _Moll Flanders_. He’s never heard of it. He finishes it in six hours anyway. 

Which is how he finds himself reading through much of pre-twentieth century English prose, not to mention a few French or German works in translation. He prefers the non-fiction, but reads whatever he’s given—Dickens and Thackeray, Gibbon and Addison, even Richardson. He presumes they choose the books to be harmless and tedious. Some of them he enjoys (once, they carelessly give him a copy of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ , which he reads the thousand-plus pages of three times over before he admits he’s finished it), a lot of them seem ridiculous or pointless. But he reads, steadily, meticulously, relentlessly, as if he were dissecting a bird or extracting the meat from a nutshell, regardless of what the book may be. 

Won’t Charles be surprised, if they ever speak again. 

He still starts and comes to from time to time with the book dropped out of his fingers and his gaze fixed sightlessly upwards, but it helps, for now.

A little over a year in, he realizes, all at once, that Mystique isn’t coming. She must have decided that the risk was too great to be able to justify.

He’s proud of her, he tells himself. She’s so strong. Better to stay outside and fight than to let sentiment be her downfall. After all, he’s only one man. She doesn’t— _need_ him.

It’s still one more thing that might make one day different from the next gone. 

That almost seems more important than the possibility of escape itself.

Time passes.

Time passes. 

Time passes. 

Or, at least, he thinks it does. He hasn’t seen a clock or a calendar since they brought him here. 

He knocks over the king in the game of chess he’s been attempting to play in his head. He would let Charles gloat or lecture or tell him “I told you so” without any objections, if he would only come.

There’s a change in regime, and they decide to take his books away. For the first time, he begins to fear that he won’t survive this. Not as himself. 

He’s seen men broken by imprisonment before, raving, tearing at themselves, howling at the guards. Degraded beyond recognition. He will not give that to them. 

He leaves the food on the next tray untouched, and the next, and the next. 

They’re so hopelessly dim that he’s three days into the hunger strike before they realize what’s going on. 

“What’s wrong? Don’t you care for the cuisine?” Miller, the new captain in charge of the facility, scowls down at him. 

He gazes upwards. “I want my books back.” 

“Out of the question. They’re a security risk.” 

“They weren’t a security risk a week ago,” he says patiently. “I want them back.” 

“They might give you ideas.” 

He has to laugh. “What ideas could possibly be worse than the ones I already have?” 

“It’s not open to debate, Lehnsherr.” 

“Well, neither is my position, then.” 

He crosses to his mat, sits on it cross-legged. 

Miller sneers. “What makes you think anyone cares whether you starve yourself to death or not?” 

That question had occurred to him, and the answer. “The fact that I’m not already dead.”

He’s been hungry before, of course, many times, but it’s never been as easy as this. Outside, hunger meant the sharpened pinch of anxiety, the desperate need to keep moving, the fear that he wouldn’t be able to. Here, it only concentrates his stillness. He lies on the mat, hands clasped, and feels as if he might float up out of the cell at any moment, leaving his body behind. As if he could transcend prison through pure exercise of will. After four years, it’s a very appealing thought.

His body had been always a weakness. It was what still gave Shaw power over him once his parents were gone, its vulnerability to needles and knives and saws. When he was on his mission, it tripped him up, wanting food, sleep, warmth, sometimes things harder to classify or deny, when all _he_ wanted was to keep going. And, in the end, it had brought him here. The sense of _overcoming_ it is so very welcome. 

He stops pacing his cell, he even stops shaving, in favor of lying still and savoring the feeling. 

One afternoon, without warning, they fill the cell with some kind of sedative gas. It takes Erik at least a minute to distinguish the effects from the dizziness he’s feeling all the time now. He can’t do anything but lower himself gently to his mat. 

He wakes, or almost wakes, with a tube being forced down his throat. It’s slick and plastic and unyielding, an endless instant of nightmare slide— _halte mich auf, Erik, wenn du kannst_ —and his entire _being_ spasms. He feels the table buckle beneath him and instruments rattle and fall, though he can’t seem to open his eyes. Someone shouts, and an alarm goes off. His arms are bound with something not-metal, but the bend in the table gives him room to slip one free and claw frantically at his face. The tube comes out through his nose with another horrifying squelch, and he flings it away from him, gagging. 

“Give him some more Thorazine, for God’s sake!” 

“There’s already fifty milligrams in him—“ 

He’s still strapped down. He flails his legs, trying to free them. If only his eyes would open faster. He lashes out towards the voices with every scrap of metal he can attract, and someone screams. 

There’s a stabbing pain in his upper arm, and then he doesn’t remember anything else.

When he wakes, he’s back in his cell. The familiar little plastic tub is next to his mat. In it, _The Pickwick Papers_.

He laughs, then winces at the rawness in his throat. He’s won. 

The problem is that it stopped being about access to Victorian novels some time ago. He’s been chasing death these past two weeks at least, and it’s felt as pure and clean and intoxicating as the oxygen deprivation he’d experienced trying to stop Shaw’s sub. The books mean nothing in comparison. 

When they send the tray through the chute, he doesn’t touch it. 

After a few minutes, one of the older guards appears. “What’s wrong with you, Lehnsherr? You got your leisure reading.” 

“I’ve lost interest,” he says, and closes his eyes.

Three days later, the extraction team comes. He thinks they’re going to try to force-feed him again, but they only manhandle him down the hallway to the conference room. Anna is sitting at the table, legal pad in front of her. Her eyes widen as she takes him in. He must look terrible. 

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he says, taking a seat. “It hasn’t been the usual six months.” 

For a minute, he’s not sure even about that, and he gladly gives way to the vertiginous sensation. 

“Erik.” He realizes she’s been talking. “Erik?” 

He opens his eyes. “Yes. Sorry.” 

“They brought me in because they want me to persuade you to stop the hunger strike,” she repeats. 

“Oh? Because you’ve done so well at persuading me already?” 

She smiles ruefully. “I know. But I promised. Any opportunity to see a client. So…” She puts on a formal tone. “Erik, as your attorney, please allow me to advise you to stop your hunger strike.” 

He has to smile back a little at the surreality of it. “I don’t think I will.” 

“Well, I’ve tried.” She tilts her head and studies him more closely. “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything.” 

“Not a thing.” It’s wondrous: he needs nothing at all. 

“There never has been, has there?” She gets up. He automatically tries to rise as well, but can’t. She taps at the door for the guard and turns back. “For the record, I’ll be sorry if you succeed.” 

“Oh?” 

“Of course I will. I’ll never have a client with a case like yours ever again.” 

“I’m afraid, Anna, that keeping my lawyer’s mind busy isn’t enough for me to live for.” 

“I know. And…it’s not something a lawyer likes to accept, but I know you enough to be sure that no one’s ever changed your mind by arguing with you.” 

“Not really, no.” 

“So I won’t bother with that. Goodbye, Erik,” she says, as the door opens.

It’s only half an hour later, lying in his cell again, that he realizes what she _hadn’t_ said, and stifles a curse. 

He considers pretending to himself that he hadn’t noticed, but he can’t. 

When the next tray comes down the chute—they’re offering him only electrolyte solutions now, he must seem far gone—he reaches for it. It’s very far away.

“So, you’ve decided not to die,” Charles says, heartily, condescendingly. They’re outside on the terrace. The sun is so bright he has to squint to see Charles’s face. “That’s wonderful, Erik. Just wonderful. Are you sure you can manage it?” 

“If I’m going to berate myself for my lack of courage, I should at least have the nerve to show my face,” he snaps. 

Charles raises his eyebrows at the illogic. “But then you wouldn’t be able to worry about me. You _are_ worried about me, of course.” 

“Of course. Anna knows something. She told me—or didn’t tell me.” 

Charles smiles dismissively. “That may have been clever, but what are you going to do about it?” 

He doesn’t have an answer. 

Not yet, he thinks, as the hallucination wavers, resolving itself into the cell and the packet of fluids under his grasping fingers. Not yet.

He has to wait out the six months to see Anna again. It’s just as well. He’s weak as a kitten, all the lean muscle he’s so carefully built up over the past few years wasted away. They won’t give him solids for nine days. The first time he takes a bite of rice, it settles in his stomach like lead. He feels a fleeting regret about falling back again into the physical world, but pushes it away. It’s necessary. 

He abandons the books and turns Anna’s message over and over in his mind, the way he’d once played with the coin, as he lies still or tries to rebuild his strength. It can’t be good news, that much he’s certain of. No one would go to the trouble of identifying and contacting his secret lawyer just for that. His imagination presents him with a relentless parade of horribles. Is Charles dead? Would he really have gone without reaching out one last time to say goodbye? ( _He_ had said goodbye.) The world curls and blackens at the edges as he thinks about the possibility. But if that’s the case, there’s nothing he can do, nothing to plan for in the outside world. Not until he finds out who he needs to make pay for it.

What else could it be? He’d long known about the paralysis—one day, after a mental reconnaissance, Emma had announced it indifferently, filing her nails. He and Mystique had made frantic love that night, each trying to hold onto the other in a different way, and just managing it. So it wasn’t that. But what could be worse? Arrested? Terminally ill? Lost his _powers_ —no, that was too absurd even to think about. 

In the end, all he’s certain of is that whatever’s happened, he has to do something about it. Which he can’t do at the bottom of this pit. But it’s not as if he hadn’t devoted years at this point to figuring out how to get out, with no success. And he may not have much time. Charles may be dying as he sits there and forces down mush and tries to rebuild his quads. 

When the idea comes to him, he considers it with surprising reluctance. In part because it’s a terrible plan—he _knows_ it’s a terrible plan—but he’s bulled his way through with worse. No, he admits to himself, his half-hesitation means they have weakened him just this much, in this small degree. And they’ve done it as Charles had done it, with kindness. Well, they all know how that turned out for everyone. He shuts down the doubts and does pushups until his arms tremble too much to hold him up.

When the appointment with Anna comes, he goes prepared. The guard has barely closed the door when he’s leaning forward on the table. “How is he?” he demands. “Tell me.” 

“Erik,” she says calmly, as if a man more than a foot taller than her isn’t invading her space, “we’ve discussed this. I can’t tell—“ 

All right, he thinks, it has to be like this. He snatches up the plastic pen lying next to his hand on her legal pad, grabs the back of her neck, and presses it into the soft flesh of her throat, right at the carotid. “Stand up." 

She doesn’t. “Erik,” and though he can feel the quiver in her throat, there’s none in her voice, “this is an extremely bad idea. But you can still stop. Let me go.” 

“I’m sorry,” he says, “but you know as well as anyone how many people I’ve killed, and whether I want to or not I _will_ add you to the list if you don’t stand up, _so_ _please_ _stand up_.” 

There’s something a bit too much like hysteria in his voice at the end of the sentence. He’s faintly relieved as she swallows and complies. This would be much harder with her bleeding out. He shuffles around the table and stands behind her. 

“First, tell me how he is.”

“Erik, you know I can’t—“

“I’m threatening your life,” he says, almost gently. “You have no choice. So tell me.”

“Hank McCoy says that he’s not doing well at all. That he’s closed the school, whatever that is. He says…” She hesitates. 

“Go on.” 

“He says you should know it’s your fault.” 

That stuns, if only for a second—he’s been incommunicado in prison for five years, and _he’s_ responsible for Charles doing worse?—but he recovers. No way to go but forward at this point, though now he’s even more uncertain about what’s waiting for him on the other end. 

“All right,” he says. “Now, we’re going to leave this room together.” 

“Erik,” she says, “Erik, until that door opens you can still change your mind. There are ten armed guards out there. What do you think you’re going to do?” 

“Walk to the elevator with my hostage,” he says. “You must have seen this in the movies.” 

“Yes, Erik, and it doesn’t usually end well for anyone.” 

Still trying to talk him out of it. Just what Charles would do. The thought both hurts and steels him. 

“No more talking,” he says, and reaches around her to open the door. 

The guard is careless. He’s leaning against the wall, eyes closed, as they come out. Erik manages to deliver a sharp elbow to the temple before he finishes gawking. One down. 

Unfortunately, it only takes one of the remaining nine down the hallway to shout and get every gun in the place trained on them. An alarm begins to wail in the distance. He wonders how long it will take to bring reinforcements. In the Pentagon, it can’t be long. 

“All right,” he says, “this is what’s going to happen. You are all going to stand against the left-hand wall. I’m going down the right with the lawyer here. You can try shooting me, but it will only take an instant for me to open her artery.” He looks around at their faces. “Is there anyone here who believes I’m not capable of that?” 

“Okay, Lehnsherr,” the senior guard says, “no one’s going anywhere. Just drop that thing and let Mrs. Becker go.” 

“Let me clarify,” he says, and pushes the pen a little harder. “I will be going down this hallway with her unharmed or with blood spurting from her throat. Either way, I am going down this hallway now, so _move_.” 

The senior guard waves the rest to stand against the wall. He turns her to face them, putting his own back against the wall, and begins shuffling sideways down the hallway. With the shackles, it’s agonizingly slow. He stares at the men as he passes. The senior guard is still talking, and now his hostage is crying, but he ignores it all, alert only to a potential attack. He hasn’t concentrated so hard in years. It’s like lifting the submarine.

He reaches the gate. “You,” he snaps to the closest guard, hardly more than a boy, “come here _slowly_ and unlock this." 

He looks back for instruction, uncertain.

“Not gonna happen, Lehnsherr,” the senior guard says. 

He shifts his free arm from the hostage’s waist to her throat and pulls up, cutting off her air. “I _really_ would have thought that everyone here would understand _completely_ how little I value the lives of humans. Do I _have_ to make a demonstration?” 

“Erik,” she whispers, “ _please_ …” 

The boy looks back at the senior again. 

“There’s nothing through there but backup teams, Lehnsherr. You won’t even make it to the elevator.” 

“Let me worry about that.”

The senior guard nods curtly. Erik almost closes his eyes with relief as the younger one fishes out the key.

The gate opens, and he starts to back through it, uncomfortably aware that he’s now exposed to attack from the elevator. 

He turns his head a little to check behind him, and the pen comes away from the hostage’s skin just slightly.

His foot suddenly explodes with pain, stunning him. The hostage ducks under his loosening grip, and then he’s being tackled by very large men. 

His _foot_. He’s been taken down by a woman’s heel driven into the top of the paper-thin prison-issue shoe. He has a moment to marvel at that before the beating begins in earnest. 

It’s a particularly bad one, high on a very long list, made worse by the sound of Anna yelling at them to stop. “He’s down—can’t you see he’s down—why are you _doing this_?” After a minute, that dies away as her heels clack down the hall, running for _help_ no doubt, and he’s grateful, because it’s one less in a remarkable series of pains suddenly blossoming all over his body. He curls up, protecting his head as best he can, and takes it. 

He must have gotten hit in the head, though, because, just for a minute, he thinks Charles is there, sitting on the floor next to him. “Oh, Erik, what have you done,” he sighs, and touches his shoulder. “All right. Just hold on. It’ll be over in a minute.” 

He tries to grasp at Charles’s hand, but someone lands a particularly devastating blow to his solar plexus, and he blacks out. 

He comes to once more in the silence, and there’s not an inch of his body that doesn’t hurt. His ribs are taped, his right hand is splinted, and his left leg is in a cast from mid-shin to foot— _broken ankle_ , a vivid memory suddenly informs him. His head is muzzy with an undoubted concussion and whatever powerful cocktail of drugs they must have given him to keep him quiet in some medical facility.

That’s a memory, too, rippled and uncertain: the relentless beeping of machines and the people who kept coming into his room. Shaw, that CIA manager he’d killed, Hank, Emma, Alex, Nazis whose faces he couldn’t remember and who therefore wore none at all. They’d milled about, arguing at the top of their lungs, til he’d shouted, “Get out!” 

All of them had vanished in a flash. Except Raven, who, somehow, had been there all along, sitting in a chair by his bed flipping through a magazine with a detached air. “I’m not going anywhere,” she’d said. 

“You’ve always been gone,” he’d told her, then someone must have upped his dose, because he remembers nothing more. 

He doesn’t particularly want to get up, but his mouth is dry and the bottle of water is a sadistically long way away. He pulls himself to a sitting position and scoots himself across the floor for it. 

“Lehnsherr!” Captain Miller is standing at the edge of the glass. 

He’d be glad to ignore him, except that he does have a question. “Yes?” 

“You’re lucky to be alive. Pull a stunt like that again, and you may not stay that way.”

“Yes, yes,” he says wearily. “Threats acknowledged. Is An—Mrs. Becker all right?” 

“She is. No thanks to you. You won’t be getting any more _legal aid_ down here.” 

“For all the good it ever did me,” he mutters, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. 

Miller keeps talking for some time, but he loses track, taking the water bottle back to bed with him. 

Even breathing hurts. All right. It’s just a body. It doesn’t have to be his. 

He’s done the best he could. Truly, Charles, he has. If they want more from him, they’ll have to come get him themselves. He’s emptied out now, or emptied enough. And in that empty space he can finally see the trick to waiting out the years: letting them fill him as they go by without resistance. Letting the never-ending light of the place simply pass through him, transparent. It’s the only way to save anything at all. 

He laces his fingers together and begins. 


End file.
